Red Light (12 page)

‘Honest people?’ said the woman. ‘Where? I do not see any honest people. I see only you.’

With that, she climbed down from the Range Rover and walked away from it, at least twenty-five yards, before she eventually turned around and beckoned to him.

Mânios Dumitrescu hesitated before he opened his door. He didn’t look at her, almost as if he didn’t want to acknowledge that she existed. For her part, she waited patiently, while the large white cumulus clouds slowly rolled overhead and the hooded crows soared around and around in leisurely circles, as unflustered as she was.

His door clicked open and he stepped down from the driver’s seat.

‘
Keys
,’ she called out.

It was only then that he raised his eyes and looked at her. She was an ebony-skinned young black woman, no more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, with her hair shaved up on either side of her head and a tangled topknot of corkscrew curls. She wasn’t tall, no more than five foot six inches, but she was broad-shouldered, with large breasts and narrow hips and proportionately long legs.

She was wearing black drainpipe jeans and black boots and a black T-shirt, with a sleeveless black leather waistcoat slung over it. Around her neck she was wearing a necklace made of beads and shells and claws, and both of her wrists were decorated with silver bracelets.

‘So – who are you?’ demanded Mânios Dumitrescu. He narrowed his eyes, but she was wearing huge wraparound sunglasses that hid most of her face and reflected the sunlight in two dazzling stars.

‘Keys,’ she repeated.

‘I don’t see no gun,’ Mânios Dumitrescu challenged her. ‘Where is this famous gun you say you got?’

‘You really don’t believe me?’

‘Ha! I believe my eyes, that is all. If my own mother said that she was the one who gave birth to me, I would not believe her, either.’

The young woman reached into the right-hand pocket of her waistcoat and tugged out a flat grey pistol, not much larger than an iPhone 5.

Mânios Dumitrescu lifted up both hands and said, ‘You joke me. That is toy.’

‘Try me,’ said the young woman.

Mânios Dumitrescu took two or three moonwalking steps back, jingling his keys as if he were taunting the young woman to shoot him – that’s if she really
could
shoot him with a gun so small.

She held the pistol up in both hands and pointed it at his midriff.

‘Keys,’ she said. ‘I am not the best of shots but I will try to blow off your dick.’

There was a long moment of high tension. Mânios Dumitrescu stopped jingling his keys and stood absolutely still. He could have been one of the human statues who pose outside Brown Thomas in Patrick Street while passers-by pull faces at them, trying to break their concentration.

The young woman remained motionless, too, keeping her pistol aimed between his legs.

After almost a quarter of a minute, Mânios Dumitrescu dropped his heavy bunch of keys on to the concrete.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I play your game. What do you want me to do now?’

‘I told you. Walk slowly to number fourteen. Go inside. The door is not locked. Go upstairs to the main bedroom.’

Mânios Dumitrescu reluctantly did as he was told, walking in a jerky, stumbling marionette way that betrayed how angry and frustrated he really felt, even though he was trying to give the young woman the impression that she didn’t bother him at all.

Years ago, the front garden of number fourteen must have been the homeowner’s pride and joy. There were two flowerbeds, with borders made of terracotta rope-top tiles, and a large concrete gnome in each of them. Now, however, the garden was overgrown with bindweed and all the red and blue paint had been weathered from the gnomes, so that they looked like two lepers.

The front door had originally been painted lime-green, but all that paint was blistering and peeling. It juddered on its hinges when Mânios Dumitrescu pushed it open and stepped inside.

Once he was standing in the hallway, he called out, ‘Bridget! Rodika! Miski!’

‘You are wasting your breath, Mânios,’ the young woman told him. ‘Your girls have all gone out for the day.’

Mânios Dumitrescu stared at her, and now he was really astounded. ‘They have gone
out
? Where? Who the fuck said that they could go out? They are not allowed to go out! They are supposed to be working! What has happened to their clients? Those girls can’t go
out
!’

‘They can and they have and all their appointments for today have been cancelled.’

‘What! You can’t fucking do this to me. This is my business,
scorpie
! This is my bread and butter!’

‘I know,’ said the young woman. ‘Why do you think I am here? Now, get upstairs.’

There was another moment of tension. Mânios Dumitrescu stood with his hand on the banister, breathing deeply and evenly to control himself. The tense feeling was accentuated by the narrow, claustrophobic hallway, with its faded floral wallpaper and the bead curtain hanging over the kitchen doorway to try and give it the atmosphere of a brothel. A dried-up yucca plant crouched in a planter at the foot of the stairs, as if a huge dead crab had suddenly dropped down from the landing above.

The whole house smelled of damp and musky perfume and stale sweat and bleach. Through the wall, they could hear the muffled sound of a television comedy from next door, with occasional waves of canned laughter.

Eventually, Mânios Dumitrescu began to climb slowly up the stairs, with the young woman only three or four steps behind him. When he reached the landing he hesitated again, but then he turned into the main bedroom on the left-hand side and she followed him.

‘Now what?’ he said.

Although the curtains were drawn, they were of cream-coloured loose weave and so the sunlight filtered in. Most of the bedroom was taken up by a king-sized bed, covered with a shiny pink satin quilt which had innumerable stains on it. On the ceiling above the bed was a mirror with smudges and fingerprints on it, and on the bedside table stood three dildoes of different sizes – one maroon one, which was gigantic, almost the size of a man’s forearm with its fist clenched, and two thinner ones, with a fourth dildo curled around them, which was long and snake-like and double-ended. There were also several bottles of Durex Play lubricant and a pack of baby-wipes, a lamp with a pink frilly shade, and a clock.

On the wall facing the bed hung a framed Jack Vettriano poster of a nude woman. Something was smeared across her face, which could have been chocolate.

Mânios Dumitrescu looked around. ‘So what happen now?’ he demanded. ‘Why did you want to come with me here? I come here anyway. But my girls, I have to get them back. Every hour they don’t work, it cost me money. It cost
them
money, too. Ten appointments a day, at least, that is the rule.’

‘How old is Miski?’ asked the young woman.

‘What? Young, of course. Who is going to want to fuck some old granny? But how should I know?’

‘Miski is fifteen years old.’

‘And? So? She likes what she does. She is good at it! Best gobble-job in Cork, that is what they say! And what else could she do? She cannot read. She cannot write. She cannot add up number! So what are you? Some friend of Miski?’

‘Take off your clothes,’ said the young woman.

‘What? Are you crazy?’

She pointed that small grey gun at him again, directly at his face this time.

‘Take off your clothes, Mânios. All of them.’

Mânios Dumitrescu turned away, one hand lifted, shaking his head.

‘You think I would take off my clothes just because you ask me? Like I say, you’re crazy.’

‘No, Mânios, I am not
asking
you. I am
telling
you.’

‘Oh, you with your toy gun? Well, the answer is of course no. You can go and fuck yourself. I have enough of this game now. I want to know where my girls are and I want you to go. Enough of this
cacat
. Look—’

He reached into his pocket, took out a flick-knife and sprung it open. ‘What is it to be? Huh?’ he said, circling it around and around, loose-wristed, like somebody used to fighting with knives. ‘I think real knife beat toy gun, how about you?’

The young woman lifted up her sunglasses and tucked them into her corkscrew curls. She had strikingly unusual looks, with high cheekbones and wide-apart brown eyes. Her nose was short and straight and she had a strong, prominent chin, as if she had a very slight underbite. Even though he was so angry and so irritated, Mânios Dumitrescu could recognize an exceptionally attractive woman when he saw one.

‘Hey …’ he said, suddenly grinning his rat-like grin. ‘Why don’t we just say quits, yes? You go, you get out of here, and we will leave it like that. No hard feeling either side. How about that?’

‘Don’t come any closer,’ she warned him.

‘Oh yes? And you are
really
going to stop me, are you, with that pea-shooter?’

The young woman reached into the left-hand pocket of her waistcoat and produced a slim black shotgun shell. She held it up and said, ‘You must know what this is.’

Mânios Dumitrescu stared at it without saying anything.

‘Maybe you have not heard of these guns,’ the young woman told him. ‘They are called personal protection pistols and they take just one of these shotgun shells. But one is enough if you are standing in the way when one of them is fired, which
you
will be.’

Mânios Dumitrescu thought about that, with his eyes narrowed. Then he slowly folded up his flick-knife and held it tight in the palm of his hand.

‘Throw it on the bed,’ said the young woman. ‘
Now
, take off your clothes. All of them.’

He tossed the flick-knife on to the quilt and she immediately picked it up and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she stood back and watched him as he unbuttoned his shirt, baring his white concave ribcage and the long grey hairs that grew out of his nipples. He prised off his beige leather loafers and then dropped his crumpled grey trousers and stepped out of them. He was left in nothing but a pair of yellow-stained boxer shorts with black and white pictures of Felix the Cat all over them, and a pair of white calf-length socks.

‘Come on,’ said the young woman. ‘Everything.’

Mânios Dumitrescu let his boxer shorts drop to his ankles and trod his way out of them. Then he balanced on one leg after the other to roll down his socks.

He stood in front of the young woman completely naked, his pubic hair wild, his penis dark and diminutive, but he kept his arms folded defiantly across his chest and made no attempt to cover himself.

‘Go and sit on the bed,’ the young woman told him. ‘No, not here – over there.’

He went around to the opposite side of the bed and sat down, round-shouldered. The young woman picked up all of his discarded clothes between finger and thumb and tossed them out of the door on to the landing.

‘I curse you to death for this,’ Mânios Dumitrescu told her. ‘
Tr
ǎ
sni-te-ar moartea, s
ǎ
te te
tr
ǎ
sneasc
ǎ
!
’

The young woman took no notice. She went over to the dressing table by the window, opened the left-hand drawer, and took out a pair of steel handcuffs.

‘Put your feet up on the bed,’ she told him.

‘So – I know what you plan to do,’ said Mânios Dumitrescu. ‘You plan to call back my girls, and then to shame me, in front of them! Look, here is your boss, no clothes, tied up like chicken!’

‘Put your feet up on the bed,’ she repeated.

‘Okay, whatever you like. But I tell you, this will make no difference! Those girls, they respect me! No matter what you do to me, they will still respect me!’

‘I know,’ said the young woman. She took hold of his hairy left ankle and clicked one of the handcuffs around it. ‘That is because you will beat them until they bleed if they don’t.’

She fastened his ankles together, and then she stood back for a moment. ‘Look at you now,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Just look at you.’

‘All right, I look like fool!’ snapped Mânios Dumitrescu. ‘Well done! You make big boss look like
t
ă
mpit
!’

‘But you are not looking!’ insisted the young woman.

‘I do not have to look! I do not
want
to look!’

‘
You are not looking!
’

With that, she pushed him hard in the middle of his bony chest with the heel of her hand. He fell back on to the quilt and found himself staring up at his reflection in the mirror on the ceiling. For nearly five seconds he remained transfixed, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

‘That is
you
, up there!’ said the young woman. ‘That is Mânios the big boss man. Mânios who likes to hit women and cut people’s throats if they make him angry and treat little children like slaves. Look at you! You said you looked like a chicken! No, you do not look like a chicken! You look like a
spider
!’

Mânios Dumitrescu closed his eyes tight. After a while, through gritted teeth, he said, ‘Is that it? Are you finish with me now? What are you going to do now? Take photograph, yes, so that you can show them to all of my girls? Well, do it. I don’t care. I don’t give a shit for you and I don’t give a shit for anybody.’

The young woman sat down on the bed beside him. ‘That is exactly why I am here, Mânios. When somebody has no feeling for anybody else except themselves, they are a danger to the world. That is when the Avenging Angel has to visit them.’

‘Oh, and
you
are the Avenging Angel, are you? Ha! First
negri
angel I ever saw!’

‘Think whatever you like. But the Avenging Angel has to visit people like you to punish them for their evil. And more than that, the Avenging Angel has to
prove
that she has punished you.’

‘
E
ș
ti nebun!
E
ș
ti complet nebun!
You are totally mad!’

‘No, not at all. In most countries in Africa, if somebody has been caught for doing wrong, and punished, it is always necessary to produce evidence to the authorities that the punishment has been carried out.’